Description

The affective aspect of music, often referred as music mood or
emotion, has been recently recognized as an important factor in
organizing and accessing music information. However, music
mood is far from being well studied in information science. For
example, there is no consensus on whether to use mood or
emotion to refer the affective aspect of music. Also, the lack of
consensus on music mood categories in the Music Information
Retrieval (MIR) community makes it difficult to compare
classification approaches developed in different laboratories. On
the other hand, there is a rich literature in music psychology that
has addressed many of the issues MIR researchers want to know.
This research reviews theories in music psychology and
summarizes fundamental insights that can help MIR researchers
in interpreting music mood. In order to investigate whether classic
theories are still applicable to today’s reality of music listening
environment, this study also derives a set of music mood
categories from social tags, using a combination of linguistic
resources and human expertise, and compares it to music mood
categories in psychological theories. The results verify that there
are common grounds between theoretical music mood models and
the reality of music listening, but theoretical models do not cover
all mood categories emerged from social tags and thus need to be
modified to better fit the reality of music listening.